Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the technology that were you bringing to market with Bolt? What were you looking for commercialization?

Justin Grooms: We had an initial all-in-one checkout product that we were selling to SMB merchants. Bolt had good success with that.

Sramana Mitra: A point-of-sale checkout product?

Justin Grooms: Yes. What we wanted to do was to basically break the product apart a little bit and give larger merchants the opportunity to tap into this huge network of shoppers that Bolt had built over time. , An API-based network of shoppers was something that no one else at the time had. We wanted to commercialize that and find a way to get large retailers or large brand groups to opt in. To work with a San Francisco-based high-tech startup located in Selma was a big leap.

Retail, in general, is not necessarily seen as an early adopter of technology. We were going into a mission-critical, high reliability, high security portion of retail, which is that checkout piece. It was basically handing over payments and working with a partner like Bolt to manage identity for shoppers and to help to enable transactions. It was a very sensitive part of retailer business. So, we were not only needed to sell access to the shopper network, but we also needed to sell into a customer base that was very savvy and very tech skeptical.

Sramana Mitra: What was the SMB merchant base? What was the value of that? Were they just customers of Bolt or was there something else going on? Why did you need to connect them into the retailers?

Justin Grooms: The SMB merchants were small retailers themselves, maybe selling $10-$20 million a year online – very respectable businesses.

Sramana Mitra: They were brick-and-mortar retailers.

Justin Grooms: They were brick and mortar retailers that had an online presence.

Sramana Mitra: What were you managing? Were you managing the online presence or the physical checkout process?

Justin Grooms: Bolt has a network of about 85 million shoppers in the United States. We can provide API-based online access to that network of shoppers and a whole bunch of identity information associated with them for retailers to facilitate. Initially, the checkout was the buying experience online, and subsequently it has evolved over time into allowing retailers to deploy a fully opted-in identity scheme on their site to allow shoppers to raise their hand and say, “I want to share my information with this retailer so that I can have a curated buying experience.”

Sramana Mitra: How was this 85 million consumer network built?

Justin Grooms: It’s a virtuous network of, of retailers that have signed up with Bolt. It started with those small early adopter retailers who joined Bolt because they just wanted a good checkout technology, a good checkout experience, which is something that Bolt also provided. Over time, as real-life consumers out in the marketplace would go to these retailers’ websites and check out, they would opt-in to create a Bolt account at the end of that process.

Once they created that Bolt account, that Bolt account was available for those shoppers to use on all of the retailers that deployed Bolt. These are, you know, big respected retailers like Saks OFF 5th, Revolve, Casper, and Lucky Brand. We started small with these smaller retailers, which started to grow over time to now some of the largest retailers in the United States.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms
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